Electronic music is known for its mechanical sound. Although snythesizers can produce a wide variety of musical notes, the variations cannot be changed rapidly. Changes require turning knobs, moving levers, working pedals, or altering a computer program; and not many of these operations can be done during a performance. The inability to change envelope shapes quickly or spontaneously results in the same envelope shapes being repeated for many notes and gives the music a mechanical or machine-made sound lacking in sensitivity and expressiveness.
In contrast, skilled musicians with traditional instruments can vary their musical notes nearly instantly. Their variations occur as quickly as their fingers, lips, tongues, etc. can react to what they hear, and they can alter note shapes as rapidly as they occur. The result is fluently expressive music that communicates much more fully than has been possible for electronic music.
In working to bring electronic music under the expressive control of the performer, I have developed a signal shape controller that lets the musician shape the envelope of each note, as quickly as the notes are played. Controlling the envelope shapes controls the musical phrasing of the notes and lets the musician create electronic music as fluently expressive as music performed on traditional instruments.
My controller allows the musician's voice to control envelope shapes for fast and effective phrasing of electronic music. For any instrument that does not involve the musician's voice or mouth, the full range of expressiveness of speech and song is available for the musician to use in shaping notes otherwise produced electronically. It thus offers musicians a new source of expressive control that does not require mastery of the neuro-muscular techniques demanded to achieve expressive control with traditional instruments.
My controller also allows one instrument to control the envelope shapes of notes produced by another instrument so that the controlling sound is not limited to a musician's voice. My controller thus creates many new possibilities for interaction among musicians and makes new musical effects available to performers and composers.
By attenuating sounds weaker than the voice control signal used by the musician to phrase the music, my controller provides a noise reduction system that lets a microphone reject ambient sound. By making an audible output depend on the presence of an input control signal, my controller also eliminates hums and noise otherwise produced by electronic components in a music system. Moreover, the way my controller combines a controlled signal and a controlling signal makes possible new performance techniques that can vary the musical results.